Sam Lipsyte is a great satirist.

I meant to review this awhile ago, and apologize. I'm planning on re-reading HARK because its message resonates just as loudly today as it did 2 years ago. We need humor and understanding - our leaders need to understand that.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Hark has a belief that focus is everything and his beliefs take on a larger than life existence, much to his chagrin. He inadvertently gains a cult following regarding his concept of mental archery. I have to be honest, I didn’t love it. I’m confused whether it is supposed to be funny (as GoodReads lists it as humor) or some kind of deep discussion on meditation and spirituality.

Schlubs I Have Known

I guess we can always use another book about aimless middle aged failures, as long as there are a few funny throwaway lines and occasional witty banter. Oh, and easy cheap shots and cavalier deep thoughts. If so this is the book. Forget characters or plot. You could read the chapters here out of order if you wanted to. Skip entirely the optimistic blurb about people "...seeking meaning and dignity in a chaotic, ridiculous, and often dangerous world." This is a stand up comedy rant, with all of the high points, low points, inspired bits, and tedious stretches that you would expect from such a performance. Viewed in that fashion, I enjoyed this a good deal.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

This took me a long time to read after been given the galley. It was hard to get into but once I did... I really enjoyed.

I received a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Hark is a very funny, twisted look at the messed up characters so desperate for meaning that they band together to launch a movement from a series of repurposed yoga poses and a psuedobabble about focus. The right combination of money, marketing, hype, and catching a popular wave propels Hark Morner from YouTube to packed auditoriums to a festival and international acclaim, and of course with that many people, moneyed interests attempt to coopt the message in the form of a millionaire always telepresent on a tablet.

The plot focuses on the hangers on of the inner circle as they watch the movement take on a life of its own, and attempt to massage the message. Hark himself is barely present and usually being shepherded around between performances, possibly with too much emphasis on others, especially Fraz -- his right-hand man and perennially butt of jokes, the biggest one being his flailing marriage.

Still, this is a great book with crazy characters that may or may not shed some light on what's going on behind the curtain and scenes of real populist movements and hype-inducing fads.

Thank you to the author Sam Lipsyte, the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my candid opinion.

I typically love satire and this book is transparent enough to sound somewhat like the current socio-political environment of the world and specifically the US. What I liked about it: it made some great points about the dangers of some current huge issues such as no one liking or believing anyone related to the government and too much digitalization/screen time. I did not really like the anti-hero Fraz who was not only sincerely self-interested, lazy, lacking any focus or motivation, who ultimately takes the easy way out. I found him , as well as many of the characters to be not only annoying but almost useless. I did like Hark who is a one-time comedian, one-time charlatan turned modern day messiah. He is the only one who tries to not sell his self-help as a religion. But things get away from everyone and they all become caught in a relentless spiral.

I also still struggle to really comprehend the conclusion to the book.

I really do not know to whom this kind of book would appeal, Yet the book had many good points, too..

Fraz Penzig is just meandering through life with little ambition and not much excitement in raising his twins with his wife, Tovah. He runs into a man named Hark who expounds on the teachings of Mental Archery. Fanz gets caught up in the movement Hanz accidentally starts and what once was some self-help jargon turns into an unhealthy cult.

From that premise, one would expect some amazing dark comedy, right? NOPE. Written like a cheap self-help book,  you are presented with too many words; leaving your mind desperate to find meaning in the flouncy actions and dialogue. So, your brain grasps at any sort of footing as you wait for something magical to happen.

And I think that may have been the whole point.

That does NOT mean I enjoyed this. Every word feels like work and I frequently just put down my kindle and held my forehead in exasperation. In the end, everybody sucks, everybody dies, and self-help won't get you around those two immutable facts. An absolutely miserable read. 2 out of 5.

Unfortunately, I requested this book, but didn't get to read it before it was archived. I wish I had gotten to it.

Thank you for the review copy. Unfortunately, my reading schedule hasn't opened up to give this book a fair shot, naturally we all have hundreds of books to review, but it is certainly on my list and I will let you know if I love it. Thank you again.

This is the first book from Sam Lipsyte that I have read and I only found out about it because I saw it on NetGalley and I thought it sounded interesting. I'm so glad to have read it. Where has Sam been all of my life?!

I enjoyed the writing so much that I found myself highlighting my “favorite” parts on almost every page. I read another review in which the critic felt that the author was a bit overly self-congratulatory on his cleverness. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but I might be self-congratulatory too if I were so clever. The turns of phrase, the vivid metaphors, the fun with words, and the twisting inside-out of popular assumptions held me in thrall. I savored each page, anxious to read more while simultaneously hesitant to reach the end when I would be forced to leave his words behind me.

But here's the problem. I reached the end and I thought, “huh?” About ¾ of the way into the book I realized that I didn't really care about any of the characters. Whether they lived or died was irrelevant to me. My connection was to the author and to how the plot allowed him to wield his magic. He explored the issues of a society disconnected, run by oligarchs, and the role of religion and how people can be manipulated. But I wasn't really sure what he wanted the reader to believe.

I almost deducted points from my review, but ultimately, I enjoyed the book too much to allow the author’s failure to make a cogent point dissuade me from loving what he wrote. I would read this again because it just felt so damned good to read something intelligent and clever and funny.

I just didn't get this. I think it was trying to be funny, but it just didn't work for me. I didn't finish reading it.

After reading the blurb about this book I was very intrigued. However after about a quarter of the way through I had to give up. None of the characters really connected with me and I just did not care. Unfortunately this was not a book for me but I could think of multiple people who would enjoy this story.

I think I might not be the target for this book. The whole message missed by a mile in my opinion, even though the concept was great. A guru who gets everyone to believe in his "mental archery" method of focusing. Everyone around him wants to find a way to make a dollar off of his concept/him and all fail in sometimes rather funny ways. I got the humor, but sometimes the descriptions painted made it feel like the author had a grudge against everything in modern society from yoga to being a parent. If this book was a person, I'd still want to hang around them, but I'd most likely roll my eyes every time they went on a tangent.

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 15, 2019

At regular intervals, Hark made me burst into laughter because of its astonishing silliness. I love finding a novel that will do that. While Sam Lipsyte lost his way a bit in the last quarter of the story, the plot is only secondary to the wit. If you like clever goofiness for its own sake, you’ll probably enjoy Hark. Hardcore Christians, however, might find some of the humor near the end of the story to be distasteful, if not sacrilegious.

All of the characters in Hark are quirky. Hark Morner is sort of a self-help guru. His career began as a joke before he began to take it seriously. Inspired by a toy bow he found in the trash, Hark encourages people to think of themselves as archers shooting at targets. Mental archery is all about focus.

Fraz Penzig, having lost his teaching job, accompanies Hark on speaking tours when he’s not tutoring rich kids. He needs the idea of mental archery to give him hope in a dire world. Fraz is married to Tovah, but their relationship is troubled. Teal, who went to prison after playing Robin Hood with corporate funds, is now a therapist helping Fraz and Tovah with their marriage. Their domestic drama is an amusing diversion from the novel’s other amusing themes.

Kate Rumpler is one of Hark’s acolytes. Hark stays in her living space, although the nature of their relationship is ambiguous. They don’t have sex because sex would distract Hark from focus. Kate likes Harkism because she sees it as a tool rather than a philosophy, a way of achieving peace of mind that doesn’t yet invoke the tyranny of meditation or yoga.

Other characters want to monetize or market Hark. Some characters worship Hark; others hate him. Some place their faith in the power of mental archery in the way that some people place their faith in prayer; others have no faith in either one. Many believe that Hark has transformed their lives. Hark isn’t quite sure what to believe about himself. In fact, it is never quite clear from his speeches or notebook scribblings that Hark has any well-formed beliefs at all, which might make him the most honest character in the book. Still, his understanding of mental archery (and of himself) evolves during the course of the story.

The plot is silly in a way that is mildly twisted. I’m not sure that the chain of events recounted in Hark, from the musings of an angry catfish to the theft of bone marrow, even counts as a plot. The story takes a surprising turn with about a quarter of the novel remaining that eventually leads to a redefinition of Hark. It later becomes clear that the novel is taking place either in the future or in an alternate, war-torn present. Ironically, the novel loses its focus after the turning point. Lipsyte might have tried too hard at that point to be outrageous, but he still manages to deliver some laughs.

Hark touches upon moral issues, including whether turning self-help into a profit-generating enterprise is unethical, or whether it only seems that way to people who have adopted an outdated ethical model. “Ethics, after all, is merely a dance, a daring jig on morality’s wire, high above the lava lake of nihilism.” The book also raises questions about the nature of faith and belief, given how easy it is to eschew evidence in order to believe in a god, a healer, a shaman, a religion, or a self-help guru. Is one faith any less valid than any other, no matter how ridiculous it seems to people who have equal faith in something else that is equally untethered to evidence? Maybe faith qua faith has value even if the belief itself does not. Perhaps it is better to believe in something than to accept “the sour invitation to the void.” The novel makes no serious attempt to answer those questions. It chooses instead to be whacky and playful and that’s why I like it.

When Hark breaks down and babbles incoherently, people love him even more. And maybe that’s the point of the story. The idea of self-help, the idea that we’re doing something to improve ourselves by spending seven minutes listening to a lecture, might be more important to us than the actual self-help message, which we probably won’t internalize and might not even understand. Self-help messages can always be distilled to a few words — in Hark’s case, “You should focus” — and everything else is just salesmanship by “happiness hustlers” (a phrase coined by one of Hark’s acolytes). The pure form of a good idea is quickly commercialized and adulterated (who wouldn’t want an app that helps you focus?). Hark isn’t the only book to make that point, but it is one of the funniest.

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There’s very little overlap in the writing Venn diagram of “funny” and “literary” – even most ostensibly humorous literary fiction definitely deserves the scare quotes around “funny,” while genuinely funny stuff doesn’t often have the requisite stylistic heft to warrant the literary tag – but Sam Lipsyte lives right square in the middle of it all.

Lipsyte’s new novel “Hark” is another example of the author’s incredible gift for balancing poetry and potty humor, for blending the profound and the profane. This latest book – his first since the 2012 story collection “The Fun Parts” – once again places the American experience square in its sights, embracing the depths of inescapable weirdness that exist just beyond casual cultural perception.

It’s a quick-fire reading experience, with short chapters and frequent perspective shifts, capturing the kind of inner turmoil that can only come from discovering someone who you believe might actually have answers to the toughest of tough questions, namely: why?

In an undefined near-future America, one marked by end-stage upheaval on every possible front – geopolitical, economic, cultural, environmental, you name it – Hark Morner (yes, as in “The herald angels sing”) is the central figure in something he calls “Mental Archery.” This … whatever it is … stitches together half-baked mindfulness and ripped-off yoga poses with tossed-off riffs on misremembered history and mythology. Oh, and archery of course. It’s a slapdash pastiche of new age nonsense and platitudes.

And yet, it works.

At least for some. For people like Fraz, a man in his 40s who stumbled across Hark in a parking lot and found himself following the tenets of mental archery; his family life – wife Tovah, twin kids David and Lisa – might be crumbling, but he’s become an integral part of Hark’s circle. Ditto Kate, a wealthy trust fund kid who is the primary financial backer of Mental Archery and spends her free time as a volunteer escort for organ transplants. And then there’s Teal, academic high achiever-turned-embezzler, now an ex-con looking to find the connections and reconnections she seeks through social work and self-help.

And flitting around the margins is a bizarre collection of weirdos – self-styled culture warriors and social media tycoons, poets and tech titans, the flat-broke and the billionaires. All of them seeking the solace that they believe they can find with Hark’s help. But Hark isn’t even sure that there IS meaning here – his only aim is to help people find focus. What they choose to focus on is up to them.

Of course, with popularity comes problems. Hark’s circle steadily expands, meaning that the voices of even those closest to him can be drowned out by the roaring of crowds. For Fraz and Tovah, for Kate and Teal, this means digging deep and determining just what Mental Archery is – and who or what Hark really is, the man whose teachings they’ve come to love even if they don’t really understand why.

“Hark” is one of those books wherein the reader can do little more than hang on tightly, pulled with breakneck pacing through a joyfully anarchic and chaotic, yet delicately detailed world. The America that Lipsyte has constructed is a strange (but logical in its strangeness) extrapolation from now to then. The timeline is left deliberately vague, while certain details make clear that the history of this version isn’t quite what we ourselves remember.

The faux-wisdom of Hark, who could be anything from an accident huckster to the Messiah depending on who you ask, makes up some of the funniest material in the book. His speeches are meandering declarations packed with off-the-cuff explorations of half-remembered tiny truths; he spins these kernels into larger narratives that are offered as accepted reality, no matter how far from the real they actually venture. Combine that with the striking physicality of bowless, arrowless archery poses and you’ve got a delightfully odd send-up of the blurry gray area between seeking self-help and dogmatic indoctrination – an area that Lipsyte takes no little joy in examining.

Of course, a large part of what makes “Hark” such an enjoyable read is the prose styling with which Lipsyte presents these ideas. He’s unafraid to let his characters hold forth with lengthy diatribes. Nor will he shy away from long and intricate looks inside their heads. And his choice to build the story of his titular character entirely via the impressions of others – Hark is one of the few into whose head we never venture – is an inspired one. It lends itself beautifully to the idea that we can never truly know the inner realities of others – even those others whom we install as our own personal magnetic norths.

It's remarkable what we’re willing to do – and what we’re willing to give up – in our search for meaning. Many of us seek to understand our place in the world – some look for help in finding it, others want confirmation of the status they’ve already claimed. And while there will always be people out there willing to help, so too will there always be people who want to exploit your quest for their own gain.

“Hark” is a rare thing – a genuinely funny work of literary fiction. If it’s any indication of what 2019’s offerings are going to be like, it’s going to be one hell of a year for books.

This book satirizes the self-help industry and religious fanaticism, reminiscent of Lamb by Christopher Moore, or Monty Python’s Life of Brian, yet of somewhat lesser quality. Hark Morner is an ordinary man who stumbles into the self-help industry with his theory of “Mental Archery,” and is quickly hoisted up as a guru by publicists/managers who see his marketing potential. Hark tours, presenting his simple message to enrapt audiences. But does he even really have a message? During his motivational performances, I couldn’t help but think of Tom Cruise in Magnolia who took himself way too seriously. Hark, unlike Cruise’s character, is not a misogynist, but similarly takes himself too seriously, which leads to some humorous moments. Overall, I would have liked more Hark and less of the people surrounding him, all of whom were significantly less interesting or amusing than Hark.

The keelson here is strongly reminiscent of Being There, which came out when I was young. Alas, this revisit to the same idea nearly fifty years later pretty much covers the same ground, as hapless guru Hark Morner drifts into the morass of modern society, wanting everyone to "focus" by using "mental archery;" the act of moving and visualizing allegedly helps one achieve that focus.

Of course everyone around Hark wants to monetize the message, and so we get a series of sometimes funny but mostly absurdist characters in a satirical look at contemporary society that dips in and out of preachiness. No subject escapes being skewered.

I think the audience for this is the young and hip, or would-be hip, who haven’t read much, and so will find the innocent-guru-used-by-weasels fresh and new, and the satire ditto.

This was a fascinating satire that really hit home, home being this insane world we are in. Well-written and hilarious, this book will appeal to fans of Lipsyte's previous novel, "The Ask."

It helps to know up front that this book is satire. I did not and was thoroughly confused until I went back and read the synopsis. Then I was good to go and really enjoyed it, even chuckling out loud at a few lines. Taking a step back, I do think Lipsyte nailed how gullible our culture can be at times, aka blindly following someone that is hyped up as 'inspiring' without really hearing what their message is or doing any fact-checking on the person themselves. Case in point - the main character, Hark Morner, is the guru that is going around teaching his 'Mental Archery' technique, telling everyone that they need to learn the 'power of focus'. He has a few trusted followers that coordinate events (mostly corporate events in the beginning), and mistakenly call him Dr. Moroner, which he keeps trying to correct, but alas, it sticks and gives credibility to the Mental Archery techniques and so it goes from there as everyone starts having their own agenda, trying to figure out who they are, what they want out of life, and how these techniques can help them get there.

I thought this was an entertaining read overall, the first two parts flowed very nicely, the third lost its way a little bit for me, but the ending was very fitting and I loved it. I don't think this will be for everyone, but if you know what you are dealing with going into it - satire on modern culture, snark factor is high, etc. then hopefully you can enjoy what you are given and just go along with the ride.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an electronic ARC of this book to review. All opinions above are my own.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. I selected to critique this title based on the summary provided, but found the book itself sorely lacking in the promised satire and storyline. In fact, the majority of the plot and characters were downright confusing and several of the situations unnecessarily disturbing.